Ever since I got involved with computers (20 or so years ago) I’ve always been buying books about various subjects to extend my knowledge and learn about new things. Over the years I’ve built up quite a little collection of books and a quick peek at my bookshelf learns me that there’s about 250 or so books there. Some them are really old. I mean really old! I think the oldest is called Using QuickBasic 4 and dates from 1987 (print). I think I’ve got a copy of it in 1989 or so (around the time of my QuickBasic era).
A couple of years ago I moved counties. I moved from the Netherlands to Australia. Guess what I took with me? I had about 11 boxes shipped over. 10 of them filled with books. So effectively I’ve been lugging this stuff half across the world.
I’ve always been intrigued with Safari (no, not the browser, but the service offering from O’Reilly). Getting a subscription to this service is very appealing to me. However, it still seems quite expensive. I do not buy books every month (I usually go through book buying phases). And since Safari is a monthly (or annual) subscription, I haven’t signed up yet. I believe that this sort of subscription/service is ideal for employers who employ programmers (hint hint).
Buying computer related books in Australia is a pretty expensive hobby. The average book goes for about $80 AUD. That’s currently about $75 USD! The average computer book on Amazon goes for about $35 USD ($ 38 AUD)!!! I guess buying in a normal store in the States doesn’t change the price that much and you get an actual physical book for that price. I guess that’s because of the shear volume of books being sold in the States is much higher than in Australia (1% of 300 million is a lot more than 1% of 22 million). Also, computer related books are not printed in Australia but overseas and have to be imported. On top of that the margin must be higher because less books will be sold in Australia and the shop owner still needs to pay the electricity bills of the book store (which doesn’t change whether you sell a 100 books or 10 books).
So, instead of buying physical books, I’ve been looking into cheaper alternatives. eBooks are a great thing. Not only are they cheaper to buy but also a hell of a lot cheaper to ship to the other side of the world. In the recent month I’ve bought eBooks from four different publishers. O’Reilly, Packt Publishing, Manning and Apress. My best experience so far is with Manning.
All the publishers so far had me create an account before I could purchase my eBook. I can see their point of view of this. By creating an account, my purchase is associated with my account. E.g. with O’Reilly I can go back into my account and download my eBook over and over again. This is handy if I ever delete my eBook by mistake, for me, Manning has succeeded the best with mimicking the real live event of buying a book. When you buy an eBook on Manning’s site and you pay with PayPal (yes, PayPal is awesome!) you don’t have to create an account. All you need to do is to click on the pay with PayPal button, which guides you through the familiar PayPal process, and the book is emailed to the email address that’s associated with you PayPal account. So yes. they have your email address but so what? So do the others with a lot more information. Not to mention the time I had to spend setting up the account, which of course next time I want to purchase an eBook I’ve forgotten the password of.
Now being true geeks you probably wonder what eBooks I purchased. This is the list:
- Pro Drupal Developement from Apress
- Up and Running with Joomla! from O’Reilly
- Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development from Packt Publishing
- Mastering Joomla! 1.5 Extension and Framework Development from Packt Publishing
- Spring in Action, Second Edition from Manning
So there you go. Lots of stuff about Joomla! and CMS related things plus a bit of Java to top it off (anything Java is still my favorite). I’ll be reading a lot for the next coming weeks. Maybe I can squeeze out another post with my thoughts on proprietary (or in-house) developed CMS systems. Have fun buying eBooks and till next time.